Industry Buzz: Animator says he’s 'not that great at drawing’

Still from Bernardo Britto’s “Yearbook,” part of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Shorts program.

Still from Bernardo Britto’s “Yearbook,” part of the 2014...

Bernardo Britto may have won the Jury Award at Sundance in January for his wry animation short “Yearbook,” but that doesn’t mean he sees himself as an all-animation kind of guy.

“I would never call myself an animator,” Britto says. “I’m also not that great at drawing, but for me, animation is the fastest, most simple way to get an idea out of my head and onto something that people can watch.”

Part of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Shorts program, opening Friday, Jan. 2, “Yearbook” watches a man compile a list of historical figures aimed at explaining the history of humanity to aliens. Britto came up with the concept at the SXSW Festival during the 2013 premiere of his first short film, “The Places Where We Lived.”

He says, “I was feeling very good about myself until I got this promotional pencil for another movie that said, 'Everything you do will be forgotten.’ So then I went down this rabbit hole: 'Nobody’s going to care about my movie 10 years from now.’ 'Yearbook’ kind of deals with the question, 'How do I create something new knowing that it won’t have any lasting value?’”

Britto used old-fashioned pencil and paper to create drawings that he scanned into a computer and colored with Photoshop. When the film’s handcrafted charms began to generate buzz, Britto switched gears. “I made a very conscious decision to do a live action next, because otherwise I’d be stuck being known only for doing animation,” he says.

In October, Britto directed the feature-length “Jacqueline Argentine,” starring Camille Rutherford (“Blue Is the Warmest Color”). The French actress plays an eccentric hacker. Britto says, “It’s a conspiracy thriller with weird Edward Snowden parallels, but very much in keeping with the tone of my animated shorts.”

As he completes post-production on “Jacqueline Argentine,” Britto points out that he hasn’t abandoned animation altogether. “I wrote a short called 'Sun Like a Big Dark Animal’ that my friend Ronnie Rivera co-directed. It’s going to play next month at Sundance. I’ll probably always be making animations just because they’re kind of fun.”

The annual “Black List” continues to speed the way for Hollywood’s unproduced scripts. Graham Moore’s screenplay for “The Imitation Game” made the 2011 Black List before captivating Benedict Cumberbatch, who starred in the movie this fall. And Julia Hart parlayed her feminist Civil War drama “The Keeping Room,” listed in 2012, into a feature film starring Brit Marling and Hailee Steinfeld scheduled for release by Drafthouse Films. Drafthouse COO James Emanuel said, “'The Keeping Room’ challenges formulas with such convictions that we were all affected by its potency.”

The Palm Springs International Film Festival has emerged as a key whistle stop for Oscar hopefuls in the foreign language category. Starting Friday, the festival will unspool 50 Oscar-submitted movies from around the world. Festival Executive Director Darryl Macdonald says this year’s crop of contenders reflects an uptick in experimental work. “The biggest trend has to do with the number of young filmmakers,” he says. “Eighteen of these movies are directed by first- or second-time filmmakers, and they’re telling stories in new ways.”

Macdonald cites Ukrainian entry “The Tribe.” “It takes place in a school for the deaf and there’s no subtitles, no dialogue, so it’s essentially a silent film,” he says. “It’s incredibly striking.”

Macdonald says the Middle East is one of the most exciting sources of cutting-edge cinema.

“In places like Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon and Mauritania, movies are now coming out of this part of the world where before, you were lucky to see two or three films over a course of a decade. ... Filmmakers now have access to digital video technology so their work can look as slick as a Hollywood movie.”